“At last I rose to go, trembling and expectant. Would she engage me? It was more than I dared to hope.
“‘Sit still, my child,’ she said, tenderly, ‘and stay with me; we shall be the best of friends.’
“I stayed—stayed to know her real worth and to win her motherly love—stayed to find, when John Murray returned, that his love was greater for my sister than for me, and patiently resigned my love to her, and then battled with a long illness when they had gone together to the far-off home. But every day gave me a new lesson on not judging too hastily. That is ten years since; and I am still in my peaceful, happy home, though only as companion to a lady.”
Chapter Nine.
My Old Sergeant.
I have visited the sick a good deal in my time, and have ever found that a serious illness is one of the greatest softeners of a rugged nature. I have noticed it in workhouse and in hospital as well as in the dreary habitations that are occupied by the poor. Perhaps it is more noticeable in men than in women, and in many cases it has seemed to me to bring forth nature’s gentility where it has for years, perhaps, been encrusted with rude, rugged ways.
One of my most genuine gentlemen by nature was a quaint old sergeant of dragoons, living in ill-health upon his little pension, and at the wish of some people in the country near our old home, I sought him out, and found him, after some trouble, in one of the little streets of Walworth, and imparted to him my mission, namely, to inquire if he could tell me the whereabouts of one John Morris and his wife, relatives of the farming people who asked me to inquire.
I found the sergeant, a stern, rugged old fellow, in his lodgings, and he looked surlily at me, being, as I afterwards found, in pain, and he saluted me with a harsh “Well, ma’am, what’s for you? I’m not in the humour for visitors now.”